Page 96 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

“More Sexpression Please!” 81

Figure 3.2 Bangladeshi film actress Pinky with a cherished production still of
herself acting out a wedding scene. Photo by Paul James Gomes.

repeated sighs, cries, and yelps. Thus an ideal female voice accompanied
the visual image. Jenny’s guttural and unpolished voice was a sign of
improper comportment, the aural equivalent of being without porda (be-
porda), lacking physical propriety.

Once inserted into the technologies of mechanical reproduction, the
notion of porda becomes reconfigured. If porda connotes the management
of women’s physical availability to unknown others, specifically men, then
the mechanical reproduction of the physical attributes of individual women
becomes a concern. The forms of bodily comportment displayed by Shima
and Jenny have come about at the intersection of cinema technology and
the standards of propriety. That the cinema in Bengal, and before it the
theater, was considered a space of vice to which women lent their bodies